Why won't major websites stop using Flash?

Maybe to show off their architecture and designs.
Without being aware that if they need crap tech to show it off, it is likely to be considered crap by the engineers.
And then they wonder why the engineers dislike them.

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And what is left carefully unsaid is that the user’s security means less than nothing to the sites that will cling to it the longest.

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The site that bugs me the most is definitely speedtest.net! I can do without all the other sites, but my ISP defaults to this site and I like to keep tabs on my connection speed.

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Overall. But there’s not a lot of dev budget for rewrites and ongoing maintenance.

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Could the communication be reverse-engineered and a commandline version be hacked in (e.g.) python?

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Oh another desktop site that uses flash… Pandora. They apparently support Html5 but I could not figure how to do this and gave up.

You know, I was going to read the article, but when the full-page “CLICK HERE TO SKIP AD” black-out appeared, I just hit Back instead.

"No, fuck you", indeed.

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When I used to do webdesign, I made a flash portfolio. I considered it to be like practicing kung fu with one hand tied behind my back.

But everyone saw it as a business card made out of gum wrappers and cigarette butts.

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Poor man’s Morpheus.

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Speaking from experience as someone who works in that particular industry as a web developer - it’s overwhelmingly because they are all trained visual designers in their own right so they have very specific ideas of how they want things to look, but their training is in a completely different medium to web so what they want is generally inefficient, virtually impossible, or a cross-platform nightmare of browser-specific code compared to simply doing it in Flash.

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GIFs are too CPU intensive? Something is wrong with your setup because the GIF density was way higher in the 90s and CPUs were a hundred times slower.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

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Like wired.com? They do something like that.

That’s a little harsh considering the number of sites not designed around having a full 4x4 4k spread that emulates the Wall Street Journal. Then again, maybe you’re subscribed to the ones that started out that way? [I knew the guy on the subway with the brolly and 4 projectors was you! etc. etc.]

Next you’ll claim you don’t like it when you go up a spiral staircase, and find that when you pause to sight a landing, you dismay that it springs twice as high as you’ve climbed. That sort of false cantilever is a joy!

GIFs are a big bag of pagefaults when the resolution’s sufficient and memory isn’t. Here there’s gifinator ready to turn everything into new format joy and people are still taking things that belong in lossy formats and ripping to GIF as if they were sharing the joy of camera raws on Instagram. Look at this low-light HDR I took of my pet from a shadowing position…isn’t it…yeah, Giffany, make me forget about it, take me away.

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I’ve never once made a site in Flash. But was it easier to make sites in Flash than with hand-coding html/css/javascript? If so, that might explain why.

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If you’re a graphical designer and are better with a Wacom tablet and an easel than you are with typing words with a keyboard, then yes, it’s much easier to use Photoshop+Flash+Dreamweaver to draw then drag’n’drop a site together than it would be for you to type in a little text and copypasta a few scripts.

I’m an utter failure at anything graphic-design, but with just the power of HTML+CSS I can actually do alright. Fixed canvas sizes are easier, but I’ve done some sites with relative sizing and such.

Basically if numbers and a little code seem scary, then you pretty much never have to see them if you choose to develop a site in Flash and Dreamweaver.

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And that’s how we end up with things that “look good” at first glance, and their usability is somewhere near zero.

Bleh.

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I see it as an extension of the “Let me Google that for you” problem.

I co-moderate a Twitch.tv chat and the streamer plays DayZ Standalone. People constantly come in asking things like “how do you install DayZ?” or “how much does DayZ cost” or “where do you find item $precious?”

We’ve already setup commands in the chat to answer the most basic questions, but things like the price of a game takes literally 10 seconds to find by opening up Steam and looking.

It’s sort of a laziness of initiative. If you want to be a webdesigner, but all you know is how to draw things, it would serve you to learn the basics of the field you’re trying to get into, or at least have a partner who can do the other kind of work.

People always want to know things, but never actually do the work to learn, instead asking for a simple answer to a problem they already know is complex and intricate.

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Yup, HTML5 video now has Encrypted Media Extensions, Media Source Extensions and Web Cryptography API to allow DRM video in HTML5, but these are relatively new APIs. I don’t think there is quite support across the board just yet and then there are older browsers to support.

Even then, browsers don’t support the same DRM server technology, IE requires Microsoft Playready, Chrome requires Widevine, Safari requires Apple Fairplay and Firefox requires Adobe Access. All these need to be set up separately with separate licenses. The cost of set up and maintenance is many, many more times the cost of running Flash video, which you still need to run to support older browsers.

For mobile, these companies either have a mobile app or don’t bother with DRM video on their site. As it’s really quite hard (but not impossible) to pull a video file from mobile browser.

Big companies like YouTube can throw a lot of money at it to have a good solution, but the majority of networks can’t afford it. I think we are likely still a few years from seeing Flash going away completely when it comes to video.

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